You should have gone online to HP.com. Not sure what stores you looked at, but I often find laptops in the $500 range at Staples, including more than one HP model. If you bought from Dell, you likely paid more than you would have at Staples or Office Max.

To be quite honest... when HP announced that they were going to kill off the Palm, I could already smell the decomposition happening. As a former Hockey Puck, er, Palm Pre owner, I have no love for the organization, for how Palm turned their back on their customers and then HP followed suit. The attempted relaunch and total backfire of webOS was icing on that cake.

When HP announced that they were going to try to take themselves down the path that IBM did a number of years ago - focus on services, sell off the laptop/desktop divisions - I thought that maybe they were on the right track. That misfire has really led me to stay away from HP - both in my professional and personal lives.

HP needs to regain an identity as opposed to this nebulous cloud of technology. Interestingly enough, I see Dell following the same path with all of their recent purchases. These giants need to determine where they're going, or they're going to implode from their own gravity.

The mismanagement of HP goes back over a decade and starts with the board of directors. They have swung from asleep at the wheel-letting charismatic CEO's go their own way-to hypervigilant-setting arbitrary and unrealistic deadlines for CEO's to achieve the impossible.

It's the job of a company's board to counterbalance the short-term thinking that results from focusing too hard on immediate shareholder value. Board members are are in effect the custodians of the long term health of a company. That means that they must require CEO's to articulate an overall vision that extends out into the future and to drive all business decisions, whether it be acquisitions or changes in direction, based on whether they fit into the big picture.

HPs board has quite simply failed at this. They rubber stamped the purchases of Compaq and EDS though both were questioned by experts in the industry and neither fit into a coherent and specific narrative about where HP was headed. They did nothing to ensure that these companies were properly integrated into HP.

Once jolted upright and forced to restructure, they brought In Leo Apotheker and asked him to fix the mess in 9 months or else. The message was "We're watching closely now." Apotheker's flip flopping wasn't helpful but frankly the problems were too deep-seated by then for him to have succeeded in so short a time with such a limited mandate.

Now we read that Ms. Whitman is also on a ticking clock. We don't read that she's been asked to start by saying hey, HP, what are your natural abilities, what do you want to be when you grow up and what do you need to major in to make that happen? We read that she's been asked to fix it. Fix what, how, why?

There's brilliance yet in the organization and some residual motivation in areas of historical excellence. But since none of it is directed at a goal, the energy dissipates faster than it can be generated. Add to this the fact that Mr. Hurd completely destroyed the employees' confidence that they would be treated justly and with respect. Hence the brain drain just when experts are most needed.

It's not easy to find any cause for optimism here and that's heartbreaking. Barring a miracle, we can only hope that the components of HP that are best of breed don't go under with the sinking ship.

HP have been like many large "IT" vendors been victim of the "deal junkie" syndrome and now face the consequences of poor strategy to integrate branding. This was an eat or be eaten world driven by short term demands from stock markets. Buying mature companies might look good with revenues but in reality they were buying old technologies. Maybe HP will be "lucky" and tackle this as others disguise the problem. Interesting to see Progress Software face reality and unload their "distractions" to their core business and downsizing just as HP will have to do?

There is another angle that may be the saving of HP. enterprise software is long overdue for change and it will be a step change that may leave incumbents in same position as HP in having to face write offs? What is this change? It will see business software become commoditised where custom solutions can be built where core code does not change no code generation or compiling. This has now arrived with a few having spent many years on R&D. Independent analyst Naomi Bloom sums it up here http://infullbloom.us/?p=3222. G«£Writing less code to achieve great business applications was my focus in that 1984 article, and it remains so today. Being able to do this is critical if weG«÷re going to realize the full potential of information technologyG«•G«£G«™.how those models can become applications without any code being written or even generatedG«•. G«£If IG«÷m right, youG«÷ll want to be on the agile, models-driven, definitional development side of the moat thus createdG«™..G«• In a subsequent tweet author said G«£It really matters how your vendors build their software, not just what they buildG«• and Michael Krigsman a leading analyst tweeted referring to the article G«£Pointing to the technical foundation of futureG«•.

HP may just have an advantage over others for this as they recognise solutions will drive all sales as you say hardware is commoditised. Maybe the stock markets should take stock on how technology companies grow in the new era of smart buyers who will be encouraged to be so by independent analysts by understanding what exactly it is they are buying into for their business software?

CEO's from Ms. Fiorina up to including the Apotheker operated the company in a manner that promoted little or no synergy between business units.

During a recent Outsourcing account review the customer remarked that they could order laptops and servers faster than HP Enterprise Services staff using online options.

The same customer (along time customer from EDS days) also remarked that the HP software solutions had fewer capabilities than the former EDS solutions. They also claimed that HP software came with an immediate remediation plan, unlike competitor's software that came with an implementation plan.

Recently, I went to look for a laptop for my niece for college.I was looking in the $550 range. HP didn't have anything to offer on that range at local electronics outlets so I went online to Dell. Have to be competitive.

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